Austin Davis’s The World Isn’t the Size of Our Neighborhood Anymore from Weasel Press, explores a range of contemporary coming-of-age echoes, including the microcosmic and macrocosmic effects of various environments on the body. The thesis of this collection centers on emotion, and it serves as a response to the question: How does one navigate where the world takes us? The answer is carried by reflection; through reflection, Davis’ omniscient-esque narrative juxtaposes sweet, innocent moments with instances where innocence is forced away. Threaded throughout, Davis strikes a balance between small-town mentality coziness and small-town mentality cons. 

This assemblage opens with an embrace of earthly address. Davis is a little Whitman and a little O’Hara when expressing, “Let’s write an ode to the tadpoles / afraid to grow into their slimy skin / and ride our bikes to Steak ‘n Shake.” The setting of these poems feels personally familiar, as they encapsulates the midwestern United States where I grew up—the Stake and Shakes, the corn, the colloquial use of lightning bugs and pop instead of fireflies and soda (pop). 

Davis’s work depicts a struggle between the exuberance of life and life’s supreme sadness. This progression of heart is not hindered by sentimentality; rather, it strives to make sense of an incongruous montage of moments which have shaped a person, as seen in “The Hole”: “with a single swing swung on, / pounding the pink and yellow head / so far into the dirt . . . and drive his neighbors back inside / with, “Trump really ain’t ​that​ bad” /  after sucking the glare / out of a couple bottles of beer.” 

Reminiscent of Mary Ruefle with “Don’t thank me for a perfect night just yet. / Don’t kiss me goodbye and call me / on your way home” from “A Trip Back Home” and (“Summer’s Over”): “Or maybe we’re just afraid / that the lake will dry up, / not like a first kiss / between chapped lips,” which is reminiscent to Ruefle’s idea of smashed love, seen in the heartbreaking image and shadow-like emotional emptiness of the bathrobe. Instead of having poems that tell the way things are blatantly, like Ruefle, Davis uses the way things aren’t to emphasize reality, thus providing a sharp yet effective turn in poetry to new images and ideas. 

Much of this collection feels like a familiar hug, one of childhood virtue or a peppering of incorruptibility—but the poems also elicit an urge in the reader to offer a hug or two themselves. I feel the urge to give out hugs while reading the revelations in the poem “Toxic Masculinity” where Davis notes the particularly masculine false-mantra “BE AGGRESSIVE /  was something your uncle with the bad eye /  growled at you” or where “Her body lay at his feet like a folded sweater. /   He stood there, heaving the way a werewolf would . . . porn teaches us that the bed is the coliseum /  and sex is a gladiator fight between a man / and the demons he’s trying to fuck back to hell.” 

With such heavy content mixed into this coming-of-age tale, Davis finds reprieve with lighter moments. There are switches in form and brevity of the poetry as well, as seen in “cigarettes / silence”: 

be

   tween

   the wind

  ow pane . . . under the hole

  in o

  ur sky

  we thought

  some paint

  could patch 

The more experimental form here feels welcome, a visual change, an opening in the static thunderstorm with a stormy tone. This visual change is striking, as it still evokes the perils which arrive hand-in-hand with maturation. 

Davis also uses landscape as a way to explore not what a poem could mean, but what could happen if you let a poem carry itself. In an avocation of fleeting moments and memory, the speaker ruminates: “I don’t remember being born on Mars. / All I do remember / is the way the tar bubbles burst into nighttime / all over the sidewalk” (“I Don’t Remember Being Born on Mars”).

Overall, The World Isn’t the Size of Our Neighborhood Anymore creates its own mantra with a sense of negation throughout the poems, evoking a feeling of pushing off, then away, away. This is not you anymore, you are not your past. You are here now, wiser, moving through a vast space because of your past.

March 2020